While reading the first two chapters of Howard Beckers' The Outsiders I came to the realization that I have not analysed deviance in such a way before. For me words such as 'abnormal' and 'deviant' were always associated with undesirable effects. After reading this book, I acquired better knowledge about these terms and learned how to analyse deviance in several ways. It was also interesting to read the different kinds of deviance, such as deviance based essentially on the medical notions of health and disease and deviance as the failure to obey group rules. I found the last one to be remarkable in particular. In this paragraph Becker explains how a group excludes certain people as being different for the reason that they do not obey the group rules which the group made beforehand. In other words; you have to be ‘isolated’ in between boundaries a group made for you to be accepted into the group and to not be perceived as deviant.

This brings us to groups of ‘outsiders’. In his book Beckers clarifies: “where people who engage in deviant activities have the opportunity to interact with one another they are likely to develop a culture built around the problems rising out of the differences between their definition of what they do and the definition held by other members of the society.” Consequently subcultures emerge.

In de second chapter Beckers considers the possibilities inherent in the career approach to deviance.
Later on in the sixth chapter asks what consequences for a person's occupational career stem from the fact that the occupational group within which he makes that career is a deviant one. Personally I can relate with the concept of careers in subcultures. I even believe that certain subcultures create and improve certain careers and skills which consequently can be proficient within that subculture. Whether to integrate more efficient in the subculture or to use during the career.

When I compare these analysis to my own experience I recognise a lot. When we immigrated to The Netherlands in 1999 I felt enormous culture differences. Things that were absolutely unaccepted in our culture, I experienced in the Dutch culture. I felt like I was among the deviance, when in fact, I was considered as the outsider. In that period of my life we moved from one asylum seekers centre to another for four years. We, the asylum seekers, were considered as a sub-culture, and that was also how we felt. We created our own habits, activities and also our interactions towards each other was different than the regular citizen; perhaps more on guard and passive. Considering I grew up between refugees in asylum seekers centres for four years, I could confidently say mastered the subculture’s lifestyle.

Mastering the lifestyle doesn’t come easy. Like every other lifestyle it has it’s pros and cons, perhaps even more cons than pros. The main problem you have to master is communication skills. It certainly takes a few years to develop your communication skills to understand and interact with the other cultures within the centres. This means not only language but also communication through behaviour.

The mastering of this ‘asylum seekers’ lifestyle’ has given me a lot of pros and it seems like the cons have disappeared over the years. It provided my with a lot of challenges which learned me to understand other cultures and taught me how to deal with them. In practice, this sub-culture taught me how to understand several cultures. But it also taught me a lot of things that don’t work in my contemporary lifestyle anymore. For example, it wouldn’t make sense to be on guard like I was back then. People would take me as being anti-social. That would place me in yet another sub-culture.